Ex-official: Hospital cost was mystery
DENVER — A former Veterans Affairs Department executive who was criticized by Congress for massive cost overruns at a new Colorado VA medical center said he was never told the price had ballooned to more than $1.7 billion before he left the agency, and does not know how it happened.
“I’m just astounded, quite frankly, I’m absolutely astounded,” Glenn Haggstrom said in an interview.
Haggstrom, who was the VA’S top construction official when the project nearly collapsed amid legal disputes and skyrocketing costs, said the last estimate he heard from the builder before he was removed from the project was about $890 million.
Haggstrom said that he had been made a scapegoat and that responsibility for the failures was widespread within the agency. But he acknowledged that he had a role because he was director of the VA’S Office of Acquisition, Logistics and Construction.
“As the leader of that organization you do bear the responsibility,” said Haggstrom, who retired in March 2015 amid an internal VA investigation into the costs.
The medical center, under construction in the Denver suburb of Aurora, has been an embarrassment for the VA.
The initial construction contract was awarded in 2010 with a projected cost around $590 million. But after years of disputes among the VA, the contractor and the design team, an independent government panel called the Civilian Board of Contract Appeals ruled in December 2014 that the VA had violated the contract by not giving the builders, the Kiewit-turner joint venture, a design that could be built within budget.
The VA then asked the Army Corps of Engineers to estimate the cost, and the answer, delivered in March 2015, was a staggering $1.73 billion. The Corps took over management of the project, and the medical center is expected to be completed next year for about $1.7 billion.
Multiple investigations concluded the costs got out of hand because the VA did not oversee the project closely enough, did not assign enough officials to it, approved lavish design elements, failed to get the designers and builders to agree on the design and tried to use a complicated form of construction contract that agency executives did not fully understand.